Reading the 20th Century discussion
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Iris Murdoch
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Here's how the schedule currently looks....
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
I must say it sounds most interesting....
The Bell by Iris Murdoch
A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns. A new bell, legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. Dora Greenfield, erring wife, returns to her husband. Michael Mead, leader of the community, is confronted by Nick Fawley, with whom he had disastrous homosexual relations, while the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved, whatever that may mean...Iris Murdoch's funny and sad novel is about religion, the fight between good and evil, and the terrible accidents of human frailty.
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The Bell was my first Murdoch and was so long ago that I ought to reread it. I have read lots of her novels...
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Hoping you will join in too for our buddy read The Bell by Iris Murdoch in mid April 2018
I will be reading it again. Vintage reprinted a lot of Murdoch's novels in the early 2000s, which is when I read most of them. The others were twenty years before that.
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I'm very excited about my first foray into the literary world of Murdoch. I hope I haven't set my expectations too high.
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https://www.ranker.com/list/best-iris...
Current buddy read The Bell is at number 4, with the number 1 slot taken by....
A Word Child
Anyone read it?
Or indeed have any other comments on the rankings, or the titles included?
Yes, I have read it, but I don't remember it very well. I would really struggle to rank all of the 16 I have read! I did like The Black Prince, The Sea, the Sea and The Unicorn. The only one I really didn't get on with was Bruno's Dream.
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Here's Miles Kington, in 2002, being very dismissive of Iris's work....
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...
....it seems that the backlash against Iris Murdoch, as a writer, is under way at last.
It couldn't come too soon for me. I started having deep reservations about her work as soon as I met it. Not from the very start, actually, as I read her first novel first, Under The Net, and enjoyed that. I can't remember anything about it now, except that it seemed quite sparky and was dedicated by Murdoch to Raymond Queneau. That was a huge plus for me, because the quirky, oblique, playful Queneau was, and still is, one of my favourite writers, so I thought that anyone who dedicated a book to him must be all right.
I never enjoyed a book of hers again......
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Far from viewing fiction as another and lesser way of dealing with philosophical questions, Iris Murdoch argued that literature was meant ''to be grasped by enjoyment,'' and that the art of the tale was ''a fundamental form of thought'' in its own right.
The ideal reader, she told one interviewer, was ''someone who likes a jolly good yarn and enjoys thinking about the book as well, about the moral issues.'
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
Reading the 20th Century
Books mentioned in this topic
The Sea, the Sea (other topics)The Black Prince (other topics)
The Sea, the Sea (other topics)
The Unicorn (other topics)
Bruno's Dream (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Iris Murdoch (other topics)Iris Murdoch (other topics)
Iris Murdoch (other topics)
Iris Murdoch (other topics)
So far, 3 of us have expressed an interest in a buddy read of her novel The Bell - would anyone else like to join in?